A little farther on they passed guards posted on either side of the path. Before long they had an escort flanking them: two older men with short swords sheathed at the thigh; a youth who walked with a limp; a tall, rangy woman with a bow and arrow pinched between the fingers of one hand.
A group of a dozen old men and women awaited them on the shore. Behind them a pier crooked out into the lake, a barge secured to it, motionless on the clear, mirrorlike water. In the distance the volcanic peak of the Sky Isle thrust up into view again, still growing from an island of cloud. The air was moist with the smell of the lake. It was strangely saltless. It’s not the sea, Dariel thought.
He glanced at Mor. She looked breathless with relief and joy. For a moment, her guise of control and detachment fell from her face. By following her gaze, Dariel picked out Yoen. That was who the look was for, the look of a daughter seeing a father. Yoen stood at the center of the elders. A short, frail-looking man, he favored one leg over the other, leaning on a cane of carved wood. His hair was disheveled, unruly like a child’s that had been tousled. His skin was Acacian brown, a complexion just like Dariel’s. He smiled, briefly, at Mor.
They stopped in front of the waiting elders. For a moment no one spoke. Dariel remembered the squirming burden in his arms. He set Cashen down. The pup stood, unsure of the moment’s protocol.
The woman to one side of Yoen wore a circlet woven of leaves. It looked like it could be dismantled by a light breeze. Her features had more solidity, and her voice was Talayan. Dariel could tell from the timbre of it, even though she first spoke Auldek. Mor answered her, bowing her head as she did so. The two spoke for a moment, and then the woman turned toward him.
“Are you the one they call Dariel Akaran?” she asked, speaking Acacian.
“I am.”
“Did you speak with Na Gamen, the Watcher of the Sky Mount?”
“Yes.”
The man whom Dariel already thought of as Yoen asked, “Did he tell you to come here?”
“Yes.” Dariel looked at him, realizing that he wore no signs of belonging, no tattoo or piercing or any other enhancement.
“What did he tell you of the circle?”
“That it could be closed,” Dariel said.
“It can be, though the way is hard.” The man lifted his left arm, crooked in an invitation to an embrace. “I am Yoen. Come to me.”
Dariel stepped forward. He raised his arms, thinking that he would set them lightly on the man’s thin shoulders so as not to harm him. He was completely unprepared for what happened next.
It was not that the old man was fast, but just that the action did not make sense until it was completed. Yoen’s lowered hand snatched the hilt of Dariel’s dagger. He slipped the blade free from the sheath and thrust it upward into Dariel’s gut with a force that should not have been possible from such a frail-looking arm. The impact doubled Dariel over on top of Yoen. The pain did not stop. It stayed, the moment of impact sustained and unrelenting. It was so great that the burning sensation on his forehead barely registered.
When Yoen pulled back, Dariel looked down at the shaft of the dagger, the blade deep in his abdomen. “I am sorry,” the old man said. “This had to be done. You had to be killed, so that…”
That was all Dariel heard before he toppled to the ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Have a drink, brother,” Sire Grau said, motioning toward the servant entering with a tray of tall, thin glasses. Another servant set down a display of cheese parcels wrapped in edible leaves. A third hovered nearby, an intricate mist pipe in his hands. “Or a pipe, if you wish it.”
“No, thank you.” Dagon waved the servant away. He lowered himself to the floor cushions in Grau’s plush quarters. Why a man as elderly as Grau would choose to sit on the floor baffled Dagon, but he sighed and patted the pillow beside him as if he liked nothing more than to lie about in the middle of the day.
“You really should have a drink,” Grau said. He selected a glass from the tray and handed it to Dagon.
“If you insist,” Dagon said.
“I do,” the older man said. His glossed lips smiled, though the expression was limited to the mouth. His cheeks and eyes and forehead did nothing in support. He waved the servant away, having not taken anything for himself.
Dagon held his frown hidden deep below the surface of his face. He sipped, smiled, and made an audible indication of pleasure. He was certain that Grau knew he did not like liqueurs, especially pungent ones redolent of fennel, as this one was. At least, he thought he knew. Perhaps there was nothing sinister in it. Grau was past his hundredth year. He could be forgiven for misplacing specific likes and dislikes of the myriad leaguemen he communed with.
Though the room was deeply shadowed, one wall featured a long balcony. From his reclined position, Dagon could see only a featureless swath of sky. If he stood on the balcony, he knew, he would take in one of the grander views of the teeming city of Alecia. To the right the Akaran palace sprouted from a hillock. A rambling estate with large gardens, it went unused by the royal family. To the left he would have seen the white stone estates of the richer nobles, with those of Agnate families flying their lineage’s crest. Just beyond them the green dome of the senate building itself. Straight out from the balcony the view stretched over the city proper. Business and trading districts, markets, residential quarters, areas rich and poor, all thronging with their own heartbeats.
Dagon had sometimes imagined stripping himself of his league regalia and wandering into the city’s alleys and lanes. What world would he discover there? How different from the existence he had always known and worked so hard to maintain? He even wondered, on occasion, if he might lose himself within the anonymity of the urban vastness and take on a new identity. The thought never lasted long. With the distinctive cone shape of his head everyone would know him for what he was. He was Sire Dagon of the league; why would he ever wish to be anyone else?
“I wanted to discuss a few things with you,” the senior leagueman said. “Did you find our council meeting as unsatisfactory as I did?”
Having no idea just how unsatisfactory Grau had found it, Dagon dipped his head, something that was balanced between a nod and a shake. Better not to offer anything more committing just yet.
“Most frustrating,” Grau went on. “We’re too spread apart. With Faleen and Lethel in the Other Lands and half the council on the Outer Isles… Seems that some of us believe the center of the world has shifted west. No longer Alecia. It’s those islands now. You and I, Dagon, are on the margins, it seems. Our so-called official council. Most unsatisfactory. Hardly a trust of mighty thinkers. Not enough of us to truly meld. Didn’t you find it so?”
He had very much found it so. The emergency council had been called at his urging. After witnessing the queen’s growing power he had needed to meld his mind with his fellow leaguemen. In so many ways that was the basis of their success over the generations. One of the first things they were taught as children was to blend their minds, to take solace in one another, to share fears and doubts and ambitions and lusts and everything else that ordinary people had to handle while locked inside the solitude of their skulls. As a child, Dagon had found the melding more soothing than anything else in life. The fact that it had always been augmented by copious quantities of highgrade mist helped, but there was something comforting about sharing with others.
That had not happened during this last council. They had gathered in the chamber in Alecia. It was the largest of their council halls, rank upon rank of reclining chairs rising from the center. It could hold a couple hundred leaguemen, but this time only twenty-six attended. Most of these were not even senior enough to sit within the first three circles. Their thoughts reached Dagon muffled by the distance between them. Never before had he noticed how often others held opposing thoughts on the same issue, and never before had he noticed the noise of minds trying to hide the very things they were there to share. Perhaps it was the particular individuals involved. He did not think so, though.
He had never noticed it before precisely because a chamber filled with minds made it easier to hide. To join. To share. To remain a single fish within a shoal of similar fish. Without the great collective motion and comfort it brought, Dagon had felt more dissonance than he wished to coming from his brothers. They were more separate individuals than he had acknowledged. The disquiet of the experience lingered with him. As, apparently, it lingered
